I am an over-achieving jogger who has accomplished more in marathon running than I ever thought possible, and now I've turned my efforts to triathlons and am shooting for my first Ironman sometime in 2010. My hope is to inspire, encourage and motivate athletes of all ages and abilities.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Great weekend of training in spite of oppressive Houston heat

With 12 weeks to go (as of yesterday) until the Longhorn 70.3 my training is going exceedingly well. This past weekend Houston had heat indexes well in excess of 100 degrees, and even the early morning or late evening temps were still above 95. Here is how my weekend went:

Saturday morning ran 15 miles in 1:57:45 (7:51 overall pace per mile), with a negative split from the first to second 7.5 mile loops that I run, and my last mile was in 7:51, which told me that I paced myself well from start to finish and didn't slow up coming in. The heat index was about 93 when I finished the run with humidity around 80%, so I feel really good about my effort under those conditions.

Saturday afternoon swam 2500m (1.55 miles) at about a 2:00-2:01 pace per 100m.

Sunday afternoon road 56.0 miles on the bike (longest ride to date and equal to the Half-Ironman distance) at about a 19-20 mph pace (just slightly under 3 hours).

I have also been keeping track of the percentage of miles put into swimming, cycling and running to see how close they are coming to the percentages of the 3 events in the Half-Ironman. Thus far, I am up about 2% in the swim, down about 5% in the cycling and up about 4% in the running. These numbers to me are good because the cycling is still by far the easiest of the 3 for me, and putting slightly more focus on the swim and especially the run I think will help me much more in my overall training and on race day.

Hi Robert. I am a beginnger runner and have been reading your blog and going to the Faithful Soles web site for quite some time and just wanted to thank you for opening up your blog to anonymous comments from people other than registered bloggers. Thank you for your inspiration.

About Me

After achieving (ok, over-achieving) more in running than I ever believed possible, I have now set my sites on doing an Ironman sometime in 2010.
My real passion is to inspire others towards their goals through my web site, Faithful Soles which is dedicated to motivating athletes of all ages and abilities. I also have on Faithful Soles what I believe to be the only categorized and searchable multi-sport athlete Blog Database on the internet where members may find blogs of interest to them by selecting categories such as age, sex, location, experience level, and events completed and/or in training for, as well as a brief description of what each blog is about. You can also link your own blog to the database (just click on "Blog Database" in the main menu on the home page and then click on the "Link your blog for free" button on the right-hand side of that page).